When I was 16, buying my first car was a highlight of that year.
She was a mint green 1971 Dodge Colt, and I worked hard to earn each of the thousand dollars I paid for her. She purred like a sick kitten and she drank oil like a greasy spoon deep fryer, yet buying her was a rite of passage and it felt great.
That was then, and this is now. And now, buying a used car has to rank somewhere in the top 10 of First World stressors - somewhere between selecting a cellphone carrier and trying to find a real person to talk to at the Canada Revenue Agency.
Why used, you ask? According to Statistics Canada, we owe about $1.63 for every dollar we earn. There is such a thing as good debt, and while mortgages or business loans are certainly among them, car loans are not.
According to The Money Finder's Stephanie Holmes-Winton, consumers should never spend more for a vehicle than they can pay off in three years. That meant those "affordable" new car offers with 96-month (eight-year!) terms and bi-weekly payments were immediately off the table.
So off to the vast used car landscape we went, spending hour after frustrating hour poring over the classified sections of newspapers and their online extensions, exclusive online inventories like Craigslist and Kijiji, and the weekly used car show put on by the Boundary Bay Lions at the Tsawwassen Town Centre Mall.
Often, we enquired after vehicles that sold before we could see them. And those we did see came with their own complications.
For example, as I seated myself behind the wheel of the first vehicle we actually looked at, the seller casually noted that I would not be able to leave his underground parking lot because the car didn't have insurance. What? I wasn't going to buy a car I couldn't drive out of second gear.
The next car looked more promising, until we typed the seller's phone number into the search engine on Craigslist and found it attached to 18 other car sales in last six weeks. We then cross-referenced those cars on Craigslist and Kijiji and learned he was simply buying low and selling high with the same cars.
By the time we viewed the next car, I was the eternal pessimist looking for the catch. Yet there didn't appear to be one this time. The car was decent and so was the price. Still, I wanted to think about it before handing over the cash, that's when the email stalker came out. The seller sent me several messages that night, each increasingly desperate for a deal. I finally blocked his address when he questioned my mental capacity. There is a happy ending to this story, though. We eventually found a car to suit our needs. The seller seemed stable, he was only selling the one car and he even bothered to insure it. Three weeks later, it's still running - knock on wood, or in this case, knock on mildly scratched fibreglass.
The only downside was I spent 45 minutes on Sunday scraping an Optimus Prime decal off the rear window. I'm just not that big of a Transformers fan.
